Cobb County may be getting a new Amazon distribution center in the county’s northern industrial corridor.
While the e-commerce titan’s signature logo on the side of a warehouse may be a welcome addition for online shoppers, it’s upsetting news for some residents who live near the property where it’s slated to go.
Developers plan to build a delivery hub that will operate 24 hours a day along Big Shanty Road.
“I didn’t move here from New Jersey to live across from a warehouse distribution center,” said Jessica Berry, a homeowner who lives in the Chastain Lakes subdivision.
Despite Berry and other residents’ concerns, Cobb County officials pushed the development forward during an Aug. 16 zoning meeting.
Board of Commissioners approved rezoning for an overnight parking lot along Chastain Meadows Parkway that will have 320 spaces for delivery vans.
During the meeting, commissioners and residents also discussed the distribution center that will be built on a separate property adjacent to the parking lot.
That property is zoned for distribution centers, so it required no approval from the county.
Scannell Properties is the Indiana developer behind the project. Kevin Moore, a local attorney who presented Scannell’s plans to commissioners, did not say what kind of distribution center will be built there. He also made no mention of the number of employees that would work at the center.
Tullan Avard, a board member of the Bells Ferry Civic Association, said it will be an Amazon hub.
She opposed the idea of such a facility next to her home. She worried about excessive noise from tractor trailers and other commercial vehicles travelling across the properties. She also dreaded fleets of over 70 delivery vans making a mass exodus from the distribution center each morning.
“Unlike the other businesses along Chastain Meadows, this Amazon warehouse will draw round-the-clock tractor-trailers and it’s serviced by fleets of delivery vans, Avard said. “This is a high-density development; this does not belong in this location.”
She and Berry were the only two who spoke out against the development at the Aug. 16 meeting. They said they were representing a cluster of nearby subdivisions whose homeowners were against it as well.
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